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"Colour theory" when used to describe themes conveyed by colour is always a bit shaky because it's largely cultural and is always hugely contingent. There's something to be said about the semiotics of colour, but most of these discussions stumble when the people discussing them take the tack that this colour does mean a certain thing as an intrinsic part of its nature rather than investigating the culture, circumstances and tradition that have caused it to be associated with that thing, and how exceptions and different contexts and subtleties of meaning are evident everywhere. Like, that article lists the things associated with pink as, "childhood, flesh, femininity". A hundred years ago, the same colour was commonly associated with courage, emotion, and the flower of manhood. It also makes the argument that many countries have red, white and blue flags because red, white and blue are somehow intrinsically "heroic" - rather than because the British Empire controlled huge portions of the world in an era where national flags were becoming increasingly relevant, and so "do it like Britain, a successful global empire" became a compelling branding idea. The American flag began life as the Union Jack with added red and white stripes, then metamorphosed into the first iteration of the "stars and bars" one year later.
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Jul 4, 2018 10:19
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That's some really interesting stuff, thanks for your posts. Reminds me of when I was getting my art therapy degree. One of my colleagues was doing her internship at Rikers Island. For one class we would bring in patient artwork (with their consent form) and discuss it in class. Much fuss was made over her patients' color choices, "ooo, ahh, what does it mean".... until my colleague said "well, uh, it's a jail, and we aren't allowed to give them red, blue, or yellow, because those are all prominent gang colors." So there you had "villains" in jail all favoriting orange, green, purple, brown, etc, simply because they didn't have access to the other colors. As a comics nerd that kinda amused me, like maybe Joker would've picked blue and red if the Crips and Bloods hadn't gone and ruined it for everyone. 
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Jul 4, 2018 21:26
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https://mobile.twitter.com/THR/status/1015377549877133312 Whoever gets his cutting boards is gonna be rich
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Jul 7, 2018 00:48
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Huh. His death was announced on Tuesday but the story was deleted. I guess they were trying to keep it from going public right away? Side note: I know a dude who managed to track down Ditko's apartment and knowing full well what a recluse the man was, he still knocked on the door and bothered him.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:52
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There will never be another Steve Ditko. Rhyno posted:Huh. His death was announced on Tuesday but the story was deleted. I guess they were trying to keep it from going public right away? People did that poo poo all the time.
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Jul 7, 2018 02:28
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One of my all-time favourite covers. And inside is one of my favourite fight scenes, between Spider-Man and Goblin. 
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Jul 7, 2018 02:49
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what the heck is the mmms
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Jul 7, 2018 05:29
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Synthbuttrange posted:what the heck is the mmms Merry Marvel Marching Society. The official Marvel fan club.
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Jul 7, 2018 05:31
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Android Blues posted:It also makes the argument that many countries have red, white and blue flags because red, white and blue are somehow intrinsically "heroic" - rather than because the British Empire controlled huge portions of the world in an era where national flags were becoming increasingly relevant, and so "do it like Britain, a successful global empire" became a compelling branding idea. The American flag began life as the Union Jack with added red and white stripes, then metamorphosed into the first iteration of the "stars and bars" one year later. I don't think it's just the British influence. The Dutch have had red/orange, white and blue tricolours for hundreds of years as well, and France adopted one for its own reasons during the revolution.
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Jul 7, 2018 05:52
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Lurdiak posted:There will never be another Steve Ditko. Mr. A would totally be an MRA
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Jul 7, 2018 06:47
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zoux posted:Mr. A would totally be an MRA It's already his name.
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Jul 7, 2018 13:57
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https://twitter.com/gabrielhardman/status/1015683222741454848
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Jul 8, 2018 12:47
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^^^That's loving cool^^^ but I never cared too terribly much for Ditko's stuff. I know I'm in the minority and I can't really put my finger on why. He's just always been amongst my least favorites of the "early legends" of the medium. Same with Curt Swan.
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Jul 8, 2018 17:35
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Maybe this would be better asked in the question thread but with Dikto's libertarian leanings and the way that Mavel comic stories were done, just how much input outside of artwork did Ditko have in the Spiderman stories. Surely Spidey would be antithetical of the libertarian ubermensch theme.
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Jul 9, 2018 15:57
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I mean, Ditko drew Peter yelling at liberal protesters, so I'm gonna go with quite a bit.
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Jul 9, 2018 16:30
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 Pete you wouldn't be the first college freshman to be taken in by the siren song of Selfishness as an Ethos.
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Jul 9, 2018 17:07
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Jul 9, 2018 17:12
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Madkal posted:Maybe this would be better asked in the question thread but with Dikto's libertarian leanings and the way that Mavel comic stories were done, just how much input outside of artwork did Ditko have in the Spiderman stories. Surely Spidey would be antithetical of the libertarian ubermensch theme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4z7xuDhMeg&t=80s 
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Jul 9, 2018 17:15
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Endless Mike posted:I mean, Ditko drew Peter yelling at liberal protesters, so I'm gonna go with quite a bit. Yeah, by the end Steve was pretty much doing all the plotting and Stan was scripting the finished pages, occasionally trying to temper Steve's didacticism (Pete's attitude here and elsewhere in the early college stories was explained away by his being distracted over worrying about Aunt May).
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Jul 9, 2018 23:32
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Madkal posted:Maybe this would be better asked in the question thread but with Dikto's libertarian leanings and the way that Mavel comic stories were done, just how much input outside of artwork did Ditko have in the Spiderman stories. Surely Spidey would be antithetical of the libertarian ubermensch theme. The reason Kirby got taken off Spider-Man in the first place is because Ditko pointed out to Stan that Kirby's "Silver Spider" character had already been sold to Archie Comics and was being published as The Fly. Kirby's idea for the strip was uninspired at best. Ditko drew a recreation of Kirby's original costume idea and it's a guy in a featureless leotard with a standard half-mask cowl like Captain America. So Spider-Man would have probably been an also-ran character like Ant-Man without Ditko's intervention. Or as Stan puts it in that Jonathan Ross interview, "I would have created something that didn't succeed." Ditko designed Spidey's costume (which was strikingly unusual at the time, and so iconic and marketable that that single contribution is huge by itself) and came up with the web-shooters. He came up with the idea of having Spider-Man doing all the iconic spider posing that he does in costume, which Lee didn't even want Ditko to do in the first place because he was scared the Comics Code people would try to censor the comic if the hero looked too frightening to children. Ditko also pushed for the emphasis on Peter Parker's civilian life. Stan wanted Spider-Man to appear on every page of the comic, so Ditko came up with the idea of the symbolic half-mask appearing on Peter's face, and stuff like the panel where the specter of Spider-Man pushes Peter and Betty Brant apart. The reason Spidey stopped fighting aliens and going out into space after the first couple issues is because Ditko insisted on grounding the stories at street level. So, Ditko had a bunch of story input at the beginning that set Spider-Man apart from the other Marvel features, and his influence kept growing as the series went on. Stan started letting him do the plotting after the first ten issues or so. He got official sole plotting credit by issue 25 and had been doing all the plotting for them a while before that. There's a story of someone visiting his studio and Ditko pointing out a chart on the wall where he had all the soap opera stuff plotted out six issues ahead. I don't know how much input Ditko had in creating the supporting characters and villains, but presumably a lot, and after issue 25, essentially all of it that wasn't established through dialogue. I'm not going to go into it in detail, but Peter actually becomes a lot less antithetical to Objectivist ubermensch stuff over time, standing up to Jonah and Flash Thompson and getting increasingly hard nosed as the series goes on. Spidey's whole misunderstood loner thing is probably a reflection of Ditko's personality and his elitist ideas about heroism. His later Objectivist superhero stories tend to focus on one puritanical hero who's too good for the debased society around him. A lot of the Jonah fake news stuff might have come from him, since he keeps returning to that theme in things like the Question. Ditko was so difficult to get along with that Stan Lee wasn't even speaking to him during the last year of his run (basically all the issues where Ditko had plotting credit) and was just dialoguing off the notes Ditko left him, with no story input. Lee didn't know what was happening in each issue before he got the art for it, and it was starting to gently caress up his ability to script. I imagine Ditko would have gotten fired at some point if he hadn't quit. Stan had already been grooming John Romita as a replacement for a while, putting him on Daredevil and plotting an issue with a guest appearance from Spider-Man as a warm-up. From Blake Bell's book, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (my source for a lot of this): quote:Issue 36 marked the fourth issue in a row where the final panel contained just a visual preview of the upcoming issue; Ditko was sharing with no one what was going to occur next. "You dream it up and give it to anyone to draw it." Yeah, bullshit, Stan. Ditko added a lot of the enduring traits that made Spider-Man a success and set the baseline tone for the feature. (Not that Lee did nothing in coming up with the character and Spider-Man's characterization in his dialogue. Ditko was a god-awful dialoguer and his sense of humor was pretty cruel and weird once he went full Randian. I was reading the early Spider-Man stories the other day and marveling at how on their game both Lee and Ditko were when the feature started.) Ditko wrote a bunch of stuff about the start of Spider-Man that I would love to read, but unfortunately he of course did it for a tiny fanzine with no web presence, and most of it's never been reprinted, except for one article where he talks about the aborted Lee/Kirby Spider-Man, which appeared in Roy Thomas's magazine Alter Ego. I've got one of Ditko's newsletters with an article where he bitches about Stan for a bit, but I don't know where I put it at the moment. Ditko's final verdict on his former collaborator, from Mysterious Suspense #1. Just read "Stan" in place of "Syd":  )
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Jul 10, 2018 00:07
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I also want to note that "libertarian leanings" is sort of a misnomer. Ayn Rand's objectivism is much weirder than libertarianism and even less tenable, and whatever it is that Ditko wound up espousing, especially in his later indie stuff, is, by turn, much weirder and less tenable than the core Rand stuff he started out from. It's not *good*, not at all, but it's a singularly unique and fairly complicated system of thought that kind of defies categorization-- I guess I'd call it like, free market Calvinism, or apophatic pragmatism, or I don't know, it's just so weird and fascinating to me, like a right-wing corollary to Blake.
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Jul 10, 2018 00:13
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Yeah people call Ditko randian but he actually ended up in a kind of weirder place than that. And being him, he rowed hard into that current for most of his life.
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Jul 10, 2018 00:52
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Objectivism is a pseudo-philosophy, a sham philosophy that appeals to disaffected, privileged individuals through a combination of psychotically extreme free market libertarianism and empty appeals to reason, primarily through narrative accounts (atlas shrugged and fountainhead). These fictional narratives revolve around what are now referred to as "Randian supermen", which basically means men (always men; Rand was hosed up) who are perfectly rational and possess magickal talents and gifts in every area of importance, which are innate to their being and independent of any causal factor in their background. The narratives are designed to make the reader constantly identify with these perfect, completely impossible beings. As narrative accounts, they're trash, and read with the smallest amount of critical thought they're clownish garbage at best, but if the reader is someone who feels put down, who thinks their intelligence or worth is underrated, someone psychologically vulnerable(regardless of how wealthy or privileged they actually are)...it's a fantastic recipe for making narcissistic, borderline solipsistic anarchocapitalists. Rand basically used the narrative to have her followers give her money and wank about their superiority. The philosophical "content" of Objectivism is basically immaterial. Its citation of other work and concepts is selective and self-serving, existing only to reaffirm the superior intuitive beliefs of the reader/Rand. It wields the theoretical elements that it proposes like sledgehammers. It's a rhetorical argument designed to separate the credulous and privileged from their money. I don't know Ditko half as well as y'all, but judging from what I've seen of his later work, his stuff is like a feverdream fanfiction expression of his own projection of the Randian superman idea, crossed with every insecurity of the age.
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Jul 10, 2018 01:42
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I remember an issue of Cracked once published Ditko's Killjoy strips
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Jul 10, 2018 01:57
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I actually find Ditko's idealism to be kind of appealing in the abstract, but his politics were appalling; a lot of law and order reactionary FYGM stuff and an atomized individualism that in practice only works to benefit the interests of the 1%. On the one hand, I think that Spider-Man and Doctor Strange took a huge dive in quality after he quit; on the other hand, if he had stayed at Marvel for much longer, Spider-Man would have had to fight Our Man instead of Blue Beetle. From Blue Beetle #5:  
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Jul 10, 2018 03:32
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Ditko strongly believed that art should elevate the common man instead of putting him down, whatever that means. He was very much against your typical Noir stories where everyone is terrible and part of an unsolvable system. I don't think anyone can truly understand what the guy was on about. And believe me, I've tried.
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Jul 10, 2018 03:43
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Lurdiak posted:Ditko strongly believed that art should elevate the common man instead of putting him down, whatever that means. He was very much against your typical Noir stories where everyone is terrible and part of an unsolvable system. I don't think anyone can truly understand what the guy was on about. And believe me, I've tried. there's only one bridge to total freedom
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Jul 10, 2018 04:00
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In refusing to acknowledge that A=A, you have stepped onto the black path of unreason and anti-life, Lurdiak.
Servoret fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jul 10, 2018 |
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Jul 10, 2018 04:03
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Yes, yes, I've read The Avenging World, but I still don't really understand it. Not really.
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Jul 10, 2018 04:27
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TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC TRUTH REASON LOGIC
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Jul 10, 2018 13:38
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I know the story about the guy finding him and discovering that he was using thousands of dollars' worth of old Spider-Man art as cutting boards - why did he never sell any of it?
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Jul 10, 2018 13:51
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Lurdiak posted:Ditko strongly believed that art should elevate the common man instead of putting him down, whatever that means. He was very much against your typical Noir stories where everyone is terrible and part of an unsolvable system. I don't think anyone can truly understand what the guy was on about. And believe me, I've tried. The little men around the gun have little bulletholes in them... 
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Jul 10, 2018 14:40
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I don't agree with the philosophy behind it, but it really is a gorgeous illustration of that philosophy. It's a really dense, lovely visual metaphor. It's interesting that all of the grey paths end in a black precipice, except for the little crumbling white islands branching off from Socialism that read "our kind", "our brand", "this variation". It seems like Ditko is referring to splinter sects of socialist ideology that, while they may do no active evil, don't have the numbers or ideological power to sustain themselves. They seem to have found areas of moral purity that are elusive to every other non-Objectivism ideology, but are still visibly crumbling and are built without a solid foundation. You kind of wonder what that means. Did he think that some post-Marxist thought was morally alright, but practically unworkable? It would be a lot more than most Objectivists think. The Rand line on that stuff is that people who want even the mildest forms of socialism are either parasites and leeches who long to exploit hard workers, or head-in-the-sky milquetoasts who don't respect hard work.
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Jul 10, 2018 14:59
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Wheat Loaf posted:I know the story about the guy finding him and discovering that he was using thousands of dollars' worth of old Spider-Man art as cutting boards - why did he never sell any of it? He believed that he had been paid for that work as part of his contract, and that was it -- he didn't sign a contract to "draw these comics, and also you can sell the stuff we don't use". The guy was a true believer in the things he was talking about. He should have gotten a boatload of money, but he would never even talk to people about it.
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Jul 10, 2018 15:16
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Discendo Vox posted:Objectivism is a pseudo-philosophy, a sham philosophy that appeals to disaffected, privileged individuals through a combination of psychotically extreme free market libertarianism and empty appeals to reason, primarily through narrative accounts (atlas shrugged and fountainhead). I don't think anybody in this case thread is in disagreement that Objectivism and Ayn Rand are the loving worst, I think what fascinates a lot of us (or me at least) is that Steve Ditko vocally adhered to a morally and intellectually bankrupt philosophy but some of his most exquisite and interesting art is deeply reliant on (very idiosyncratic) deployments of Randian ideas. And that's not to say that a lot of Ditko's work isn't extremely troubling, frustrating, or even incoherent-- I wouldn't want to meet anyone who takes Mr. A strips as their personal bible, for instance. But for better or worse he was a major aesthetic force in comics for decades, his independent stuff is fascinating and virtuosic, and there's little we can do with that as critics and readers unless we hold our nose and engage with a philosophy we (hopefully) don't like. To take another example, Helena Blavatsky was a career plagiarist whose signature trick was taking poo poo other people had written and making it more confusing and racist-- there's no reason to just throw Isis Unveiled into your bag so you can crack it open on the beach. But she had such a pervasive impact on 20th century literature that eventually you're going to have to at least digest her core concepts, or else people like Yeats and Robert Duncan are just going to look incoherent. We can talk about these kinds of authors without cosigning them. Edit: I feel bad about essentially picking on two women here so I'll also add in Carl Schmitt and Pound as another two absolute gently caress-heads who still can't really be avoided if you want to work in certain fields in good faith. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jul 10, 2018 |
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Jul 10, 2018 16:46
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So Steve Ditko's fantasy revenge on Stan Lee was to passively aggressively walk past him. Rad.
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Jul 10, 2018 17:19
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Archyduke posted:good words I hear you, but what I was trying to get at is there's really no there there with objectivism- it's the counterfeit of a philosophy, not an actual philosophy. Rand and Ditko's beliefs and positions consist entirely of circling around to how great a superhuman ego proxy is, with industry and science (and "reason" and "facts") and all other deployed concepts being mere plot devices to serve that process. There's nothing really to digest; it's "I am good/perfect" reflected through itself a thousand times, with no other meaningful content.
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Jul 10, 2018 19:08
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Wheat Loaf posted:I know the story about the guy finding him and discovering that he was using thousands of dollars' worth of old Spider-Man art as cutting boards - why did he never sell any of it? Didn't Kirby do that too, or am I mixing masters?
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Jul 10, 2018 23:45
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nsfw maybe:domino #7 has a new cover artist and uh https://i.imgur.com/Og3Ib7P.jpg 
PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jul 11, 2018 |
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Jul 11, 2018 00:33
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Some classic one-handed art.
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Jul 11, 2018 00:38
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